FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Ralph P. Swofford

The Bishop of Birmingham's sermon was sundered by the whole width of human feeling from the commonplace; it contained neither optimism nor complacency. It was, he himself said, the cry of a permanently troubled conscience. The Church of England is normally anxious about its health, but is not easily moved to a conviction of sin. The bishop's tone, however, was that of a penitent. He took for his subject one of those passages of the Gospel which are commonly relegated to the class of hard sayings, and are then passed over with surprising ease: "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven!" It was to bishops oppressed with fatal opulence, to the parochial clergy encumbered with comfortable residences, and to the members of the House of Laymen generally, that he applied this hard but very plain saying. The Son of God chose for the condition of his incarnate life that of the respectable artisan; and that is precisely the class with which the Church of England has least to do. When all account has been taken of its untiring work for the poor, it remains rather the church of the rich; and so it fails to appeal to that class which the Lord himself made most prominent, it moves in grooves which are precisely those from which Christ warned us off.... What is needed is the searching of heart that goes down to the root of evils. The evils which affect the Church will not be cured by a facile and growing conformity to current opinion, whether crystallized in a Representative Church Council or fluid in the press. They will be cured by applying to the problems of contemporary life the hard, uncompromising principles of the Gospel.—The (London) Church Times.

The need of the world is a recognition of the power of the Spirit, the development of a desire in every human heart to give its influence full sway, to foster it by communion and good works, to lean upon its strength, to become strong in character and possibilities through its power.

Religion for the average man is becoming too real and vital a feeling to admit of any further discussion regarding a hell of fire and brimstone, a heaven of golden streets and harps, predestination, or any of those things that formerly occasioned much waste of mental effort. They are all beside the issue, which is, Shall we live the spiritual life here and now, finding within ourselves our greatest reward, or shall we ignore the call of the best within us and punish ourselves by a living unrest?...

The religion of the future will be the religion of brotherhood. In the mind of every thoughtful man there stands out as never before the one ideal of this religion, the Man of Sorrows, he who said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." The full force of his appeal to men has been lessened greatly by theological discussions. He has been made too mysterious, his brotherhood to man has been lost in the surfeit of his divinity. Christ was "the Son of God," as we are all sons of God; only in him the divine Spirit reached its ideal development and makes him the example for all time to those who would lead the spiritual life. He is one of us, a man among men, perfect in his life, his thought, his union with the Spirit, bringing into his living the perfect character of which we each possess the rudimentary beginning.

Ralph P. Swofford.
The Outlook.

The average man has a religion; and we venture to say that in some important respects his conception of the Christian religion more nearly accords with that of the Master than does the conception that has been current in the Church. ... The Church has been too apt to think that Christ came to prepare men on the earth for a celestial happiness in heaven; it has been too apt to preach a religion that prepared men to die rather than a religion which fitted them to live; it has too often accepted dismal conditions in this life as inevitable, and tried to content men with their present lot by promising them a better lot hereafter. So did not Christ. So did not his immediate disciples. He told them to pray, "Thy kingdom come on earth;" and his disciples looked for a time when the kingdoms of this world would become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

The average man can teach the Church something concerning what Christ came to accomplish. The Church can teach the average man something concerning Him under whose leadership and by whose aid and co-operation it is to be accomplished.—The Outlook.

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